Haiti encounter weakens Ernesto, a ‘cane no more

Ernesto became a hurricane this morning, with winds of 75 mph. It is the season’s first and probably will not remain a category-1 hurricane for long as it appears to be intensifying. (Note: See update below).

As happened yesterday, Ernesto’s center has re-formed to the northeast early this morning. This, in part, has shifted the powerful tropical storm’s track further eastward. At this point Louisiana is probably also in the clear, although that’s not as certain as Texas’ position.

Because of this shift, the storm will very likely strike Florida, possibly giving the state a double whammy. It’s plausible that the storm could whack the Florida Keys before moving into the eastern Gulf of Mexico and recurving, possibly striking again somewhere between the state’s Panhandle and Tampa Bay.

Colorado State

A Thursday night or Friday landfall now appears likely.

As it re-formed, Ernesto has continued to strengthen. It now has 75 mph winds, and has survived the worst of the shear this weekend. It should now move into a more favorable environment for organization, with the only impediment being land.

How strong it is when it reaches Florida depends on how long the storm remains over Cuba. If it doesn’t linger over land, and spends a day or more over the warmer Gulf of Mexico, it could become a category-3 hurricane by the time it makes a final landfall.

UPDATE: It’s possible Ernesto will be downgraded to a tropical storm by the 4 p.m. update because it appears to be interacting with the mountainous terrain of Haiti. This is causing the storm some difficulty, although the weakening could be temporary because the storm’s center is not expected to pass over Haiti itself.

2nd UPDATE: It’s official, the National Hurricane Center has downgraded Ernesto to a tropical storm, with 60-mph winds.

It’s possible the system wiill re-strengthen in the 12 to 24 hours before it smacks into Cuba, and could become a hurricane again. However, depending on how long Ernesto remains over Cuba, it may well emerge north of Cuba as a tropical storm, perhaps even a depression.

This could save the Florida Keys from hurricane-force winds, and means that the western Florida coast may get hit with a category-1 or category-2 hurricane. As bad as this is for Haiti today, Ernesto’s interactions with that country’s hills and mountains has likely spared the United States an encounter with a major hurricane.

In answer to your question (Is Ray Nagin losing his mind?), I submit to you that he has already lost it! Just now, on Meet the Press, given the opportunity by Tim Russert to rephrase his “hole in the ground” remark, he rambled on and on about context, etc. Tim had to ASK him if he weren’t sorry that he had offended the families of 9-11 vicims!

He said that he was sorry if any one was offended…the standard answer by racists, when they KNOW that what they said was wrong…

I thought that nothing Nagin could say would shock me…I was wrong, twice within a few days.

What have you all been doing in Florida ? Pat Robertson told us last year that God sent Hurricane Katrina to Punish N.O for its’ sins.!

So what have you been doing down there?. According to the the religious nutters ,Hurricanes are sent by the Lord to punish people for their sins….nothing to do with all this scientific stuff about warm waters and wind shear. ! Please repent…NOW !

We, the taxpayers, are the ones funneling trillions to hurricane relief where ever it occurs. It is WE who are being punished!

Nagin forgets that, and that on that basis, the question by the “60 Minutes” reporter was legitimate. All he does with his alligator mouth, is further erode support for N’Awlins, the city and the people when he just MUST run his mouth, showing how very clever he is. (NOT)

I have seen interviews with volunteers from all 50 states. They’re working in the heat, the indescribable filth, the smells, in a unending and thankless task.

That a man so ungrateful and abrasive should have been re-elected is beyond me. Wonder if his constituents knew about his ties to rich white business men in other states?

Nagin needs to give some thought to where his next job is coming from. I can’t imagine anyone hiring him, especially in any sensitive or responsible position.

Sign me as a taxpayer that is sick of his diatribes, wherein he bites the hand that feeds him. I have vast reserves of sympathy for the every day people of NOLA; for their choice of elected officials, not so much.

What does this post have to do with hurricanes? Everything! The collective support of individual fellow citizens will be necessary when the next hurricane strikes, and Nagin has mananged to alienate a great many of them. There is no excuse for bad manners, and he’s overloaded with them.

The continued shift appears to track Ernesto over nearly the entire length of Cuba before emerging in the Florida straights. That is EXCELLENT news for Florida as it will make it very difficult for this storm to reach major category status before landfall.

The best track motion would be a track over Cuba and then immediately through the Everglades in Florida, where it would most likely be a tropical storm, not a hurricane.

Obviously, the longer it remains over water, the stronger it will get.

Florida has done evil. The Floridians have virtually eradicated Florida’s natural ecosystem and replaced it with the asphalt-and-plastic wasteland which is called “Modern Civilization” and actually doesn’t amount to much except landfill debris and pollution.

Florida is an American tragedy. In a little over a century, the developers have thoroughly abused nature and destroyed the Everglades and the Kissimmee river. Floridians have destroyed the majority of the mangrove forests which used to border nearly the entire coast of the state. Floridians nearly drove the crocodiles to extinction, the alligators have fared much better and they will likely outlive the human presence in this state.

Floridians have also become extremely obese and extraordinarily lazy. Floridians have abandoned the use of their legs and feet for the unhealthy convenience of mechanical mobility. Unfortunately, it is much easier to substitute driving for walking than to regain the ability to walk after losing the automobile culture. Floridians won’t fare to well in the post-oil future.

Floridians have also failed to adapt to the environment, instead we have chosen to adapt the environment to our own comforts. For that reason we have placed billions of dollars worth of property in harm’s way along the coast. We have also become unable to handle Florida’s heat and humidity, there are Floridians who leave their air conditioner on all the time and never leave the house throughout the long Florida summer. They drive with their air conditioners, too, because even a few minutes of Florida heat is too much for their weak bodies.

But these hurricanes (nine in three years. 9!) are not a judgment of God against Florida. Nor are they a punishment from Nature. No, hurricanes are simply a routine natural occurrence in Florida. Like snow up North or thunderstorms in the Midwest, hurricanes naturally inhabit this environment.

Floridians must learn to accept the reality of hurricanes and modify our lifestyle and development patterns exclusively. Building subdivisions in low-lying coastal areas in simply insane. Loading the coast with millions of residents is reckless endangerment.

What I suspect is going to happen over the next several decades: Hurricanes will pound Florida’s coast and demolish everything constructed by humans in low-lying areas until humankind finally surrenders and wisely decides to abandon the coast for inland environments protected from storm surge and the most terrible wind damage.

Fighting a war with Nature is foolish when Nature brings out its big guns every year. Hurricanes have wandered across Florida for millions of years, much longer than Homo sapiens have existed, and they are not going to stop on our behalf. Nature’s work is never done, but humankind’s work is almost finished.

Yea Dave, us evil Floridians. We wake up in the morning and ask, “what can we do to destroy our natural habitat and kill the ecosystem!” Jeez, non of us want pretty green palms or the best wildlife around us. Nobody moved here for that. We prefer asphalt and concrete, just like NY and by golly we’ll not stop till every reptile, bird and creepy crawly thing is gone from this state.

Umm, wouldn’t Dave be a buffoon? I think a buffon is an extinct bird once found in Central and Northwest Florida. heh heh. just kidding. I’m a former resident (inmate?) of Sanford and West Palm. Now, you couldn’t pay me to visit the state, no offense…but I’ve done my time! Give me Cali earthquakes any day!

Have you spent any time observing the behaviors of elephants, dolphins and other animals and compared them to the customs of humankind?

Of all the animals on the Earth, there is only one which exterminated every other form of life from its own environment. Care to guess which one?

Of all the forms of life on the Earth, there is only one which engages in warfare and genocide. Care to guess which one?

Of all the animals on the Earth, there is only one which chooses to not use its own body and instead turns over vital physical functions over to machines, while at the same time growing obese and virtually immovable. Care to guess which one?

***

The Homo sapiens are crazy. Humankind has gone completely mad. Look at the world which we have created. Look at the mess which we have made. Look at all the weapons which we have invented in order to kill each other.

The elephants are not burdened by our foolishness, our guilt nor our sorrow. That’s why the elephant is happy that it is not a human.

1. Humans are addicted to all sorts of drugs, illegal and legal. Would anyone care to guess what this reveals about humankind’s unhappiness and inability to cope with the Universe?

2. Humans are addicted to the distractions of television, shopping and obessive-compulsive eating habits. Would anyone care to guess about what this reveals about human nature compared to that of the animals?

3. Humans cannot seem to exist without consuming the world’s resources — nonrenewable and renewable rendered nonrenewable by destructive use — at an ever-accelerating pace. Does anyone really believe that humankind is wiser than the animals who only consume what they eat, and eat only as much as they need?

Humans imagine that they are better than the animals only because of the immense ignorance of humankind. The animals are living very well. Given the choice, they all would choose to remain animals rather than accept the burdens and pathologies of humankind.

Wow…no matter where we live, there will be bad weather, there is no one place we can survive(People live in hotter places then florida and places that get a lot colder!). If you weren’t paying attention last year, florida wasn’t the state that suffered from hurricanes, unlike popular belief Florida isn’t the only state that hurricanes can hit (who would have thought!). If you also haven’t noticed, no other state has the same environment that it once did.

Are you suggesting we committ mass suicide? If not, or even if you are, STFU. No one wants to listen to the blabbering. It’s a little to late to turn back the hands of time now, so you might as well deal with what you’ve got, for as long as you’ve got it.

The latest advisory has TD/TS/HUR Ernesto recurving right over Virginia during the entire Labor Day weekend. Thank you so much, evil people of Florida, for whatever you have done to cause the Lord to become wroth and send Ernesto over you and up our way. Ernie is going to ruin the only vacation time I’m going to get until Christmas (am I still allowed to say that word?)

I am suggesting that we, as a species, have already committed mass suicide. We’ve overpopulated the Earth while at the same time destroying the natural systems which allow the Earth to remain hospitable to human life.

The human population growth patten exhibited during the last several centuries is a classic population boom cycle, well known in biology to lead to a population crash. What happens is that the species experiencing a population boom always exhaust the natural resources which make the boom possible, eventually a time must come in which the environment cannot support the population. A massive dieoff soon follows.

Humans depleted the Earth’s resources and polluted the Earth. As if that were not enough, humans have also invented weapons of mass destruction and stockpiled enough to self-initiate an extinction event.

These are not the behaviors of a species that wants to survive. Are they?

I like David’s stuff. It reminds me of a story about a dam that broke somewhere around Ohio. A boy was washed out of his house and caught a perch on a light pole. After a while the house of one of his neighbor’s came floating down the street.

As it passed by, the roof and walls fell away revealing the family sitting motionless in the dining room. They floated on a ways, then the floor tipped over, and they disappeared beneath the flood.

Eric R. Pianka is a brave man for speaking the truth. People hate him unjustly because the idea of limits is profoundly unsettling and offensive to those taught the religion of consumption.

The religion of consumption dictates that the prosperous must always have more: bigger, quicker, faster. Hence the perpetual need to having the biggest house, biggest SUV, biggest amount of clutter as personal possessions, biggest ecological footprint, and biggest exhalations of pollution. The economy must always grow, incomes must always increase, the public must shop more often and buy expensive things.

If you program 300 million humans with the greed & gluttony program, that’s a real problem. When 3 billion humans decide that they want to live the same sort unnatural fantasy, that’s a major catastrophe.

The consumption catastrophe enhances the population overshoot catastrophe. The Earth is having a very difficult time attempting to sustain 6.5 billion humans (and this task is only accomplished at the expense of exterminating almost every other form of life on the planet). When the human population increases up to 9 billion and the Earth’s resources become depleted and the great machine of global commerce breaks down a massive dieoff will occur.

I can understand why this message is profoundly disturbing to the average Americans. Americans tolerate all sorts of horrors occurring in Africa but the thought of Americans suffering consequences from humankind’s reckless destruction of the Earth is evil. Millions of people are allowed to die every year in the Third World — Americans essentially have a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the troubles of others — but threatening the glorious American Way of Life is tantamount to terrorism.

Essentially, what the government, press and American public are saying is: “We can’t stop, we cannot slow down, actually we really need to go much faster!” Try to apply these principles to driving and see what sort of sorrows result. Now apply that lesson to consuming the Earth’s nonrenewable resources and destroying the Earth’s ecology … does any sane person really believe that these behaviors have no consequences?

You mean I missed all that stuff at SciGuy over UT’s Deadly Dr. Doomditz, way back in April (see MOTYR’s link above)!

Ah, yes, another practitioner of “Reason and Enlightenment” over the squalid race of “Home Xpot WalXart shoppers, quad drivers and gun toters”, above which these Keen-Sited Ones rise so very far, and thus shine their light upon those of us — we wretched Darwinian worms — in the pigsty below!

To do my part to keep this thread being yet another highjacked by our resident misanthropic cowardly troll, I would point out that what Ernesto (Che) is doing is very typical of hurricanes. So many of us focus on the occasional bad event and extrapolate from that the false conclusion that all storms are going to wreak mass destruction. As to Nagin, perhaps the peoplel of NO would benefit from the lessons of a national boycott: Not one tourist, not one charity, not one thin dime more of assistance goes to NO until they sincerely acknowledge the massive aid they have received. Not one more drop of sweat from vounteers until that goon of a buffoon they elected is tossed out of office. The most striking thing I heard yesterday in pitiful attempts the major networks made at looking at the NO flood aftermath is the resentful ingratitude from the ‘leaders’ of Louisiana. Attitude controls altitude, and the attitude from way too many people from Louisiana is about low class as attitude gets.

As long as people tolerate the Spike Lees, Blancos and Landrueas and the other racists and incompetents who are out lying and misleading and squandering the charity the rest of the nation rushed to give, we will see the results we have now.

I think just walking away from the people who tolerate that level of bs, and letting them stew in their own squalor, is perhaps the best way to get the message out that it is unacceptable.

My opinion of Pianka (no, I refuse to call him Doctor) and his followers remains unchanged, and I am still rather purturbed that he still works for UT. Sucking at the Teat of government and academia is probably the only way this guy will ever be able to hold a job. I vote for unemployment for him.

If you read the article regarding Pianka you would know that he is near the age of retirement and a property-owner who probably could live very well without a job. His objections to humans behavior are valid as at the most basic level they involve an observation of what humans have done to the diversity of life in his own neighborhood.

The people who are objecting to Pianka’s conclusion are, generally speaking, absolutely ignorant of both the laws of physics and the laws of biology. They really believe that humans can consume and destroy everything on the Earth without any consequences to humankind.

As a matter of fact, those consequences are already active on the Earth. See Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Also in the United States of America, as Hurricane Katrina’s revealed the existence of significant problems in America.

But no one wants to hear Dr. Pianka’s message. The thought that Americans ought to make sacrifices is considered terrorism by some. “I can’t drive my SUV. What sort of monster are you?” Of course, these same people don’t seem to mind too much that bombs are falling in the Middle East and that the oil industry has destroyed Nigeria’s environment on our own behalf.

Driving the SUV, owning the McMansion and carrying around hundreds of pounds of fat are the sacraments of America’s religion of consumption. Anyone opposing these is automatically considered a heretic and probably a terrorist.

I think it reasonable to expect that humankind will follow a similar pattern. Homo sapiens are in the population boom right now — travelling from one billion to 6.5 billion and beyond in the course of two centuries — and there’s plenty of evidence that humans have already exceeded the capacity of this planet to sustain such a large population.

What I suspect is that collapse will occur when some small but absolutely essential process of the global machine breaks down. Sort of like those million dollar race cars which are stopped dead on the racetrack because of a $1 component failing.

The human planetary intensive care system is an energy- and resource-intensive machine which is already displaying evidence of decline. Civilization is crumbing away under our feet.

And still we humans can pushing the accelerator and trying to consume as much as possible as quickly as possible. Humans are handling the resources of the Earth in the same profligate way that the Space Shuttle consumes its fuel.

When the bill for humankind’s destruction of the Earth becomes due billions of humans will die and those that remain will not enjoy life at all.

I simply ignored the old misanthropic blowhard. Sort of like our resident troll, but able to live in total cowardice thanks to the shield of tenure.

The irony that that lump of anti-human psuedo-intellect is sponging off of the endowment created by a man whose entire life affirms how empty and evil Pianka is, is tremendous. Denton Cooley has saved literally thousands of lives by his own good work, and has trained surgeons who ahve saved tens of thousands.

Pianka and his sorry ilk would be happy if they had simply died. Unfortunately, just like our troll, he is nothing more than a hypocritical coward.

I hope that you are not thinking, “I love humankind so much that we really should cover the entire Earth with humans.”

But most people appear to live under the principle: “Plants and animals are worthless. Kill everything on humankind’s behalf!” Is that your opinion?

Because humans have already killed almost everything. Environments which are most intensely population by humankind often are desolate wastelands which are essentially sterile. See for example your local mall’s parking lot.

Is that the sort of world that you want to live in? Do you really think that humans should exterminate thousands of nonhuman animals in order to satisfy the demands of human greed and gluttony?

Because that is exactly what humans are doing. Are you ok with that?

If you love humankind so much that you will exterminate nonhuman life from the Earth, I’d say that you are some sort of monster. Homo sapiens are destroying the planet and in the process destroying humankind’s future. A generation of humans will inherited a depleted, degraded and inhospitable Earth, and their will not adapt. Instead they will die. Such is the price that they will pay for our excesses.

If you love humankind, don’t kill billions of humans by destroying the planet. If you kill billions of humans because of your greed and excessive lifestyle, I’d say that “misanthrope” is too timid a word to describe your evil character.

I was just kidding around above, personally I don’t want to confuse Dr. Pianka’s career as a brilliant and hard-working field scientist with some of his moronic pontifications on social evolution and social policy, though it seems at times I am not getting much help from the good doctor himself! :^D

He’s been a very hard-working and productive scientist in his field, and has **earned** his stripes as a great field biologist and teacher of biology.

There are a lot of people running around who think the world owes them a living and that they are entitled to respect just because they have a degree on the wall, but he is definitely not one of them! This guy has truly earned his reputation in his chosen field.

But on the proverbial other hand…

These environmental doomsayers and “deep green” activists are at cross-purposes with their own goals.

We’ve already witnessed the spectacle of environmental groups across the country attempting to block wind generation projects.

Pianka, for example, has indicated that he is friendly to solar power.

But what happens when we attempt to build a solar project and it possibly threatens the habitat of a rare desert lizard protected by the Endangered Species Act?

Pianka, at one time, would have obviously been one of the scientific authorities to call in on a problem like that, but in the public policy arena his scientific objectivity will **always** be an issue now.

This is to say nothing of the effect it can have on his former and future students and their ability to credibly advise public authorities on such policies.

Which brings us to the effect on the public credibility of the science of evolutionary ecology as a whole.

Evolutionary ecologists routinely apply principles they have learned from animal population studies to human population studies, and this is the source of Pianka’s scenarios.

Are his prognostications just a blip on the radar screen of our human population models, or is there something fundamentally wrong with the whole approach?

Any body of public officials exercising due diligence and charged with making decisions on law or public policy based on such human population studies has to ask that question now, and that effectively brings down the credibility level of the studies in the public policy arena.

Do you believe in Human exceptionalism, i.e. the belief that humans are somehow different from all the other species that have inhabited the Earth over the last four billion years?

The anti-environmentalist pro-business pro-population growth crowd has some misconceptions about science, biology and reality. The Earth’s resources — including both the nonrenewable and also the renewable — are not infinite. Physical limits to humankind’s consumption of the world’s resources do exist.

The most tragic example of resource limits is extinction. At one time, billions of passenger pigeons were flying over America. Americans killed them all until now none exist, the species is gone forever.

Another example of resource limitations is found in the former tropical forests of Hispanola (now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Humans have exterminated those forests in Haiti and only small fragments remain in the Dominican Republic. What was once a self-sustaining tropical paradise has now become a garbage-strewn ecological wasteland.

Since humans have a long history of exhausting renewable natural resources, logic suggests that our extreme consumption of the world’s nonrenewable fossil fuel resources will have the same result. Burning up all of that coal, oil and natural gas has made the life easy for the prosperous and allowed the human population to skyrocket from one to 6.5 billion.

This sort of behavior cannot help but have a tragic outcome. 6.5 billion humans are made possible by the consumption of fossil fuels, how many humans can inhabit the Earth once these fossil fuel resources have become exhausted? Probably less than originally existed during the pre-fossil fuel era because we have transformed the Earth into a desolate wasteland which is lifeless, the sort of environment that affords little more than starvation once global distrution of food becomes impossible.

Humans have also apportioned 50% of the world’s fresh water resources to our own use. Given that we use so much it is evident that humankind is fast approaching a water crisis.

Even you should see that if fossil fuel crisis combined with a water crisis and you mix in a little nuclear proliferation to unstable nations into that mix, we have here a recipe for a human population collapse which could take truly Biblical proportions: 1/3 or 1/2 or 3/4th of human overpopulation could disappear in a generation or two.

Other animals that have experienced a population boom have suffered population crashes, the Homo sapiens are not exempt.

***

You ask, in a pathetically anti-environmentalist sort of way:

> “But what happens when we attempt to build a solar project and it possibly threatens the habitat of a rare desert lizard protected by the Endangered Species Act?”

I’ll give you the answer: If a solar power project threatens an endangered animal, we should not build it.

If that means that Americans are inconvenienced or are forced to live without a superabundance of energy, so much the better.

In fact, as an environmentalist I would prefer that we: Shut down all of the nuclear power plants, shut down all of the coal power plants, and shut down all of the refineries.

The American economy threatens the future survival of life on the Earth. It’s time to sacrifice the gluttonous monster so that it will stop killing people, destroying ecosystems and polluting the globe.

The downfall of the U.S. economy would have the beneficial side effects of bringing down the Chinese economy. China’s economy is unhealthy as it pumping pollution into the atmosphere at an acclerating rate and threatens to exceed America’s production of globally poisonous pollution.

Americans need to begin making sacrifices, otherwise Nature will have no choice except to make a sacrifice out of the United States of America.

Are you suggesting that scientists such as Dr. Pianka must support solar energy projects at all costs, including the loss of endangered species?

I say: No. Never.

My viewpoint is non-negotiable: No solar power. No coal power. No nuclear power. No refineries.

In addition: No more roads. No more parking lots. No more shopping centers. No more subdivisions. No more fat Americans consuming all of the world’s resources.

Humans have destroyed & polluted enough already. Should we continue along this path for much longer we will succeed at destroying everything. This path that we love so much is called “suicide” for that reason. Not only are you destroying the Earth you are also making life impossible for future generations of humans.

There is no future for the American Way of Life. The harder that you work to preserve it the more futile your efforts become. Desperate people want to build solar power or renewable energy sources, but these projects are all ultimately futile.

The American Way of Life is dying, and the Homo sapiens’ era of dominance over the Earth is coming to an end. A day will come when the lights and air conditioners stop operating. A day will come in which the cars and SUVs rust away to dust, they are useless lumps of metal without fuel.

6.6 billion and climbing! A day will come in which that number stops climbing. Very soon afterwards the number will begin a steep decline. When that day comes, humans will have bigger problems than merely losing the television, computer, automobile and air conditioner.

BTW, I just caught the Sunday Chron story about Dr. Doom, I had no idea he was being allowed to give a class on this CRAP! :^D :^D :^D

Hunter, my taxpayers group is running a study of our public school and college level curriculum, textbooks, content, etc, which will be presented to the legislature next year and will also result in the filing of a number of major lawsuits against Texas education agencies, groups and institutions, including a lawsuit to end the public school monopoly on our tax money and establish school choice and a statewide educational voucher system.